Behind the Scenes of the Brand & Market Rebrand

After about a five month hiatus, I am ushering into a new chapter in both my business and my personal life. As far as the business side of things goes, my business has been totally rebranded from top to bottom. I have new visual branding, a new logo, a new business name, and new service offerings within my business. It is looking like a totally different business than it did just 12 months ago.

On the personal side of things, we have just recently moved and are hopefully settled for quite some time. We’ve been in our house for about a month now, and so I’m starting the new year with a new business and a new home, and I could not be more excited about that.

Brand & Market Rebranding

I want to introduce what Brand & Market is going to be and how it might look similar to the Ali Rae Haney Show, what my podcast was formerly called, but a little bit different than before. The content itself is going to be largely the same. We’re still focusing on brand building mostly, and then on top of that, I’m also going to be incorporating some deep dives into other marketing strategies as well.

The main difference, however, is going to be that I will be hosting guests now, which I am super excited for. Previously, the only guest that I’ve had on was Kassie, who is my best friend and also a co-founder of mine from another business that I run. After a little bit of soul-searching during this rebrand, I realized I was really just allowing the technology aspect to scare me away from having guests. I was a little bit intimidated by adding that recording aspect to my plate, but we’re going to go head-first into guest recordings, and you are going to see me figure it out in real time.

One of Branded Market’s core values is knowledge. I do pride myself on being a research nerd. I’m not an expert on everything. If I have the opportunity to share someone else’s knowledge with you all, especially in the form of guest interviews, then I’m absolutely going to take advantage of that opportunity. I’m excited to share all of that with you in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Behind-the-Scenes of the Brand & Market Rebrand

Let’s first start at the beginning. My business has seen a lot of different iterations. I started out my business as a photography business. I niched down into weddings. When COVID hit, I transitioned from weddings because, of course, we couldn’t really gather in big groups, to branding photography. That was a lot of fun.

I realized that I loved working with other small business owners. From there is when I started to branch into more of the branding, brand development, and the marketing side of things. Once I got to that point, I felt like there were a lot of things that were still kind of lingering from my wedding photography days.

I did a complete 180 and did a rebrand back in 2022. That was essentially like shedding the wedding photography side of things and really focusing on specifically branding and brand development. I did that rebrand totally on my own. I never hired a designer to do any type of brand strategy, logo design, or anything like that. It was all internal and done by myself.

I’ve continued to grow in my service offerings. Not only on the brand development side of things, but now introducing marketing strategy, as well as marketing execution, writing newsletters for people, and social media management. There was just something that was missing. It still felt like I was really honing in on this.

Finding What Was Missing

There are a lot of educators in the wedding world that teach that having a personal brand is the only way to run your business if you want to stand out. And arguably in the wedding world, that might be true. Just take for example, me as a photographer, there are a lot of people that have my same skills. They can use a camera and work a camera just as well as me. They might have the same editing style or posing style as me. But the thing that differentiates you in the wedding world is your client experience, your personality, and it’s just a really personal industry. You’re there with people on one of the biggest days of their lives. So that personal brand is in that world oftentimes what differentiates you. I had that same mentality as I was moving from a B2C type of business to a B2B type of business.

So when I carried the personal brand of Ali Rae Haney Photography, I pretty much just dropped the photography and ran my business under Ali Rae Haney. Having my name as my brand’s business name, began to feel a constricting; it almost felt fake. It felt like I was putting on this personality to show my face on social media or to show up in any type of personal brand capacity. That’s when I knew that it was time for a shift. That feeling paired with an experience that I had at the ESC Conference last spring.

For those of you who are new here, the brand that I co-founded with my best friend Kassie, is ESC Events. We host events for creative entrepreneurs who are in their growth phase. We hosted our first event last April of 2024. I realized at that event that naming a business after myself makes it pretty hard to sell that business, because no one else is me. Selling is not my ultimate goal, but I certainly want to be able to have that type of exit as an option in the future.

So when it was time to rebrand, I completely dropped my own name as my business name. I created a fresh new business name, which is Brand & Market. It makes it very clear as to what I’m doing in my business.

Figuring Out My Ideal Client

I was finding myself identifying my ideal client as other creative entrepreneurs because I came from the wedding world, which is a very creative world. We have lots of photographers, videographers, florists, bakers, and DJs in the wedding industry and that is where I was comfortable. Whenever I was asked who my ideal client was and who I like to work with, I would say creative entrepreneurs. And that is true.

However, I was just kind of ignoring what was right in front of me. I kept getting inquiries from construction companies. I designed a website for a paving company, carpentry company, and a construction company. Then I was approached by a realtor to help her with her marketing. I was approached by someone who has a business that does real estate mortgages and insurance. At one point, I looked at the proposals that I had out and seven out of eight of them were all somehow tied to the real estate world. I just finally took this as my wake up call essentially. This realization paired with my experience in the short term rental world. It was right there in front of me all along. I’m not sure how it took me so long to realize it, but it did.

My knowledge of branding and marketing as a small business owner in a creative industry paired with my short term rental and real estate knowledge makes the new direction of Brand & Market perfect for myself and my clients. For those that don’t know, I have owned and managed three short term rentals in three different states, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. I also got my real estate license while we were living in Kentucky a couple of years ago. So I know the real estate world well, and it just finally, made sense. So that’s one of the reasons that I went through with the rebrand of Brand & Market as well.

Starting the Process of My Rebrand

I had never really sat down and wrote a mission, values, or an in-depth ideal client avatar, which is very ironic considering the field of work that I’m in. I had been kind of toiling around designing different logos for four or five months. While on a roadtrip, I was playing around in Canva to see if I could spark some design creativity within myself. I sent a couple of different logos to Kassie just to see like get some feedback on them; and she’s like, this just doesn’t feel right.

I agreed with her. I was just trying to figure out what didn’t feel right and I couldn’t do it. So anyway, I do what I do, which is calling, I call it, let it marinate. I just took my focus off of the keyboard and let it kind of sit in the back of my head until something creative struck me. I returned back to try to do design something six times in six months.

Working with a Brand Designer

Finally, I hired a brand designer, Victoria Marcoulier. Her company is BrandWell Designs. She is incredible with operations. After going through her client process and her client experience, I just admire her so much. I didn’t work with her directly throughout the brand design process. I spoke with her during the inquiry process. However, her brand designer, Aviana, was equally as great.

She had a course that she asked me to take called The Branding Business School. I went through that course during the client experience prior to solidifying the elements of my visual brand. I went through that course and I knew that I had all the pieces of the puzzle, but I just wasn’t putting them together. That’s what all of those late nights in Canva resulted in. Through actually sitting down and examining each of the pieces of the puzzle, I was able to have some of the breakthroughs that I needed to have in order to create a clear brand in terms of the mission and the values. I gave all of that to Aviana to formulate a visual brand.

I really solidified throughout The Branding Business School the mission for Brand & Market. It feels surreal; it took me so long to come to this. The mission is: Brand & Market distills branding and marketing strategy into potent and personalized plans to execute and ultimately grow revenue for growth minded businesses in real estate adjacent industries. I do branding and marketing strategy for those that are looking to grow in real estate-adjacent industries.

Bringing Personal and Corporate Values Together in My Rebrand

One of the only things that I retained from the Ali Rae Haney brand were my values. I think I am on a path to bringing personal and corporate branding together. My name is not attached to my business anymore. It’s Brand & Market LLC, but my personal core values are what make it personal. I kept these values from when my business was Ali Rae Haney, and they are very important to me.

The first is clarity. Not only do I want to have a very clear process for my clients to funnel through, I want them to feel very certain in what the next step is going to be while working with me. I never want them to feel like they are guessing as to what is going to come next. The flip side of that word is that I want them to feel very clear in their brand and their marketing strategy. I want them to feel confident that the messaging they are putting out into the world are going to attract their ideal client. I don’t want there to be any questions about that. So clarity is value number one in Brand & Market.

The second value is intention. I want there to be a very specific calculated reason as to why we are incorporating certain strategies within their marketing strategy or certain parts of their branding strategy. I don’t want it ever to be like throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to figure out what’s going to work. There should be a clear intent behind every strategy that is executed by Brand & Market.

The third value is knowledge. I am a nerd at heart. I love research and learning. I want there to be research backing, data backing, and answers to why we are going after specific strategy. I want to be the one researching what is coming next as a marketing trend. I want to take that responsibility of doing all of that research off of your plate so you can get back to running your business. I’m the one that’s researching consumer trends.

Audience Change in My Rebrand

Finally, the last main thing that changed was my audience. I transitioned from talking to creative entrepreneurs to real estate-related industries. That could be short-term rental owners, realtors, or construction companies. I’ve worked with paving companies and carpentry companies. Pretty much anyone that is touching the real estate world, I would like to work with them.

That is a huge transition that has led me into creating a lot of different things in my business like presenting service offerings different ways, creating smaller opt-ins, and low-ticket offers. One of the things that’s on the horizon for Q1 2025 is creating Instagram templates for social media for realtors. That will be a low-ticket offer that then we’ll be able to funnel into a one-on-one service that could be branding strategy, marketing strategy, etc..

Transitioning

Now that I had gotten clear on my mission, my values, my target audience, and my visual branding, it was time to really execute them and push them across all the platforms by updating everything online. When I was transitioning from just photography over to brand development services, one of the services that I offered was a brand analysis. Essentially what I did was comb through someone’s online presence and see where the inconsistencies were so that I was looking at their business through the eyes of a potential client. I was making sure everything was consistent and cohesive across all online platforms.

In the background, the last five months have been intense behind the scenes because not only am I doing this full rebrand from Ali Rae Haney over to Brand & Market. Over on the ESC side of things, we are also going through like a soft rebrand. I was very grateful that Kassie took the lead on that. She created this comprehensive list of all of the places that we needed to update things on ESC’s online platform; Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, website, email marketing platform, Canva, and all of the things that we use on an everyday basis. I basically took that list, copied it and adjusted it to all the platforms that I use for Brand & Market. It can feel a little overwhelming. There are so many small things that need to be changed in order the potential client experience to be smooth.

When I am finally done, I am going to have to perform a brand analysis on myself to make sure that everything has been transitioned over from Ali Rae Haney to Brand & Market. Aside from the small tasks, the two biggest tasks have been my website and my podcast. In terms of website, I’ve slowly started to tweak the design and the copy on the back end. I contemplated hiring a designer, but it’s something that I can do on my own. It’s something that I do for others. But when you’re doing it for yourself, it’s so much easier to have that analysis paralysis of, “Is this exactly right? Is this speaking directly to my ideal client?” My goal is to have it launched by the end of quarter one. It physically pains me to appear unprofessional online. But I am telling myself that it will pay off in the long run because it will may be not be perfect, but it will be near close to perfect.

I also had to change my domain name, which has not been changed since 2019. I had been aliraehaney.com online as long as I can remember. It was a whole process to get everything to forward from aliraehaney.com to brandandmarket.co. I even tried to find the person that owned brandandmarket.com and was unsuccessful in getting in touch with her. So “brandandmarket.co” it is until I can get my hands on that .com.

The second big lift was the podcast. It was almost like restarting the whole podcast from scratch because I had to redo all of those startup things: the podcast cover art, the podcast description, the intro and outro. All of those things had to be redone. I ended up choosing new music with the help of my new podcast producer, Haylee Gaffin of Gaffin Creative. She helped me through that process again, even though I had been through it.It was almost exactly a year ago now. And it’s one of those things like you don’t practice it every day. It’s like a one time thing and you’re done with it. So it wasn’t something that I picked up again super easily. However, we got through it. The whole podcast has been rebranded.The podcast cover art is updated, and it’s coming along.

Challenges from Rebranding

First, let’s talk about some of the challenges that I had.

Choosing a Brand Designer

First was choosing a brand designer. It took me so long to get to the conclusion that I even needed to hire one. Once I started to do the like go through the process of hiring one, I found myself getting stuck back into the wedding photography brand designer world and I was looking for something totally different. I actually had I think it was four or five inquiry phone calls with brand designers.

Ultimately, I went with BrandWell Designs because they had such a wide variety of clients that they worked with, but also their client experience and the confidence that the agency founder had on the sales call. It felt like this was where I was meant to be. She even had all of her portfolios on her website broken down into the different industries with which she had worked. She had worked with interior designers, short term rental property management companies, and realtors. I felt like she had enough experience in the world that I was in without being oversaturated in the world that I was in, if that makes sense.

Defining Mission, Vision, & Values

The second challenge that I had was defining my mission, my values, and my ideal client. As I was going through the branding process, I was really holding onto that creative industry clientele. I was still holding on to the thought that creative female entrepreneurs were still going to be part of my ideal client base. I was breaking the cardinal rule of speaking to one ideal client. Out of the one side of my mouth, I was talking to female creative entrepreneurs. Out of the other side of my mouth, I was talking to dudes in construction companies. I had to choose which way I was going and when I did, I finally felt this weight lift off of my shoulders.

Giving Myself Grace

If you are going through a rebrand, especially of your entire business and business model, give yourself grace. Let yourself figure out who you want to talk to and who you want to be a business owner. The only thing that I think I would do differently if were to do it again is to keep better records of my own experience so that I can help my own future clients go through a rebrand similar to my own.

Redefining Ideal Client

Prioritize your ideal client or your target audience when you are doing a rebrand. I often see business owners choose what they like to see in a brand; like their favorite color, or a logo that they would be attracted to. Often, we are not our own ideal clients. We may have some of the same characteristics but often times we are not the person we are trying to attract. You need to keep the ideal client that you are trying to attract in the forefront of your mind when you are choosing all of the aspects of your brand.

Takeaways

There are three major takeaways from all of this. Number one, don’t let yourself be your biggest obstacle. I had all the pieces in front of me to form this new brand but I refused to look at them and put them together.

The second takeaway is to identify your ideal client as part of your brand strategy and use that ideal client as the basis of every visual or technical branding decision when you are designing it.

Last but not least, put yourself in the shoes of the ideal client that you just designed and take a look at your online presence. You can use my free Brand Audit Checklist and that will help you make sure that you are consistent across all online platforms. I encourage you to do this even if you are not going through a brand rebrand because there are small tweaks that we do as entrepreneurs that don’t update on all platforms.

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